I posed this question this question as the title of a blogpost the irst time on February 15, 2013. It's a topic that TV Tropes--unsurprisingly--has some thoughts on. This scale is a bit granular and more detailed (and perhaps a bit more judgey). Here's my sort of summary of the basics of both of these:
Hard: So, on one end we've got fairly plausible stuff that mostly extrapolates on current technology. This includes stuff like William Gibson's Sprawl series and the novels of Greg Egan (from the near future mystery Quarantine to the far future Diaspora). A game example is this category would be somethig like GURPS Transhuman Space.
Medium: Getting a little more fantastic, we arrive in the real of a lot of TV shows and computer games. One end of this pretty much only needs you to believe in FTL and artificial gravity but is otherwise pretty hard. The fewer impossible things you're asked to believe (and the better rationalized the ones you are asked to believe in are), the harder it is. Hannu Rajaniemi's Jean Le Flambeur trilogy falls here, on the harder end. The middle of this group adds in something like psionics (Traveller gets in here, and a lot of science fiction novels, like Dune and Hyperion). The softer end throws in a lot of too-human aliens and "pure energy" beings (Babylon 5, most Star Trek).
Soft: Here lies fantasy but with a science fiction veneer and context. Some Star Trek (the animated series, particularly) comes in here, and Farscape. This is also the domain of Star Wars. Simon R. Green's Deathstalker cycle turns up here, too.
Ultra-Soft: Some Star Wars tie-ins in other media come in here, as do things that include magic (or similar fantastic elements} mixed in with an otherwise soft sci-fi universe: This would include superhero sci-fi properties (the Legion of Super-Heroes and Guardians of the Galaxy) and comic book epic sci-fi (what might also be thought of as Heavy Metal sci-fi) like Dreadstar, The Incal, and The Metabarons. It's possible it stops beings science fiction on the mushiest end of this catgory and just becomes "fantasy."
So what consistency of sci-fi is your favorite--particularly in regard to rpgs?
12 comments:
For gaming, hard end of medium. I have to tloerate some magic tech or there's be almost nothing to play, but if it goes beyond FTL and antigrav just call yourself fantasy and be done with it.
For reading, I'm a little more tolerant, it's the concepts, characters, and setting that matter then more than the tech - unless the author insists they're being predictive, in which case it better hard as stone.
Personal pet peeve: Using "nanotech did it" as a replacement for "a wizard did it" to explain utter BS that the author thought sounded cool.
I would lean towards soft with a dash of Gonzo. As a brit American Sci-fi, like Trek and Star Wars, were obviously big influences but stuff like Blakes Seven, Gerry Anderson, especially captain Scarlet, Stingray and Terrahawks, and later Red Dwarf resonated. That said 2000AD would be the main influence I would reference if (or more likely when) I were to dabble with an OSR Sci-fi project.
Love it. What I'm almost hearing here is a chaos/order alignment system, which would be fun to import to something a little harder than 40K.
How would you classify Dune?
I think on the softer end of Medium, or the harder end of Soft.
One thing I've noticed is that a lot of hard scifi authors seem to try to imagine the strangest or most implausible thing that they can technically justify by extrapolating from existing laws of physics, theories of ecology, etc.
A lot of these wonders end up being Big Dumb Objects (to use the TV Tropes parlance) - Larry Niven's "integral trees," the hollow planet-sized sphere from Karl Schroeder's Virga series, the high gravity universe in Stephen Baxter's "Raft," the weird planet in Hal Clement's "Mission of Gravity," etc, etc.
The "hardness" of the the scifi serves a purpose in those cases though. The BDO, or whatever, seems especially wondrous if it exists in a universe that follows the same laws as our own. If it really is just magic, in a story world where magic is common, it becomes less impressive.
Gosh. I think I like either Hard(ish) or Ultra-Soft. It's the lukewarm middle that makes me want to spew.
But my "hard" is still "in spaaaace" so probably really just the hard end of medium. I like stuff like Firefly and Cowboy Beebop that is confined to a single solar system. Maybe you pick only ONE "impossible thing" (artificial gravity OR FTL, not both).
A lot of the REALLY "hard" stuff is just a way of exploring future-shock and/or doing social commentary. Not fantasy enough for me.
But putting a rubber-masked veneer on the real world (a la Star Trek or the latter two SW trilogies doesn't work for me either). Maybe I'm just a fan of sword & planet type swashbuckling (original Star Wars, 1980s Flash Gordon). Maybe I'm just nostalgic.
Much as I love Dreadstar, the Heavy Metal mag, and properties like Marvel's Micronauts, there comes a point where the farcical, non-seriousness of the Ultra-Soft can really grate on my nerves. I dug the original Rocket Raccoon series, for example, but MOST "supers in space" stuff is just so much junk-garbage...especially when you run it out as an "on-going series." Herbert's Dune makes a good one-off, but the follow-ups are much less so; Warhammer 40K is fun as satire, but not really the stuff of a serious RPG campaign.
Maybe the issue is just one of story telling: some is better (or more to my palette) than others. But much as ALL these different genres/themes/styles can have a cool, initial "draw" to them, there's definitely a limit to my attention span depending on just how hard/soft the stuff is.
You know what? I realize I'm not making any damn sense at the moment. Ah well...still a good topic to ruminate over. Carry on!
; )
Depends to the setting, but I prefer medium to ultra soft. It's easier to create stuff for it.
No half measures for me. I prefer either hard sci-fi that emphasizes the science in fiction, or ultra soft space opera fantasy.
Delurking here. I'm all over the place. I love it all. But it looks like this puts cyberpunk and transhuman SF under Hard SF, and that seems mistaken to me if the measure we are using is fidelity to current science.
The central conceit of transhuman SF is technology that makes consciousness and identity transferable ("reskinning"), which is grist for philosophical arguments about the nature of consciousness but which doesn't have much to do with current brain science. It starts with an assumption that the human brain is essentially a computer, so you can do all the things with it that you can do with computers, including transferable memory. That's not based on actual science or even strong theory. By the standards of current science, transhuman SF is wish fulfillment on par with superheroes.
Fictional FTL on the other hand can be based on actual scientific principles--see quantum tunneling, Alcubierre drive--and you can find actual scientists who at least think there are possibilities there.
I think this spectrum of hard SF has a lot more to do with tone and quantity of lip service done to science, rather than actual regard for actual science. I also think it's very telling that Gibson moved on from cyberpunk, not to transhuman SF but to something much closer to the technothriller...
I disagree on on both counts, though to a lesser degree with the second than the first. First, I think it's a misreading of transhuman sci-fi to say that it has consciousness and identity is transferrable. Well, I guess it's transferrable in the same way utility service is transferrable when I move to a new home: it stops one place and a service that is identical in every respect I care about starts somewhere it. It is not really the same or continuous, just the same in the aspects that concern me.
I don't know that a theory of brain function beyond what we already possess is necessary to allow this. The brain is different form current computer both in structure and mechanism, but it's a biologic entity for encoding information. Part of this encoding is likely dynamic, so emulation is not necessarily easy, but for the purposes of science fiction stories, it doesn't hardly to be perfect to the level of a neuron. The engineering challenges of would no doubt be large, but so are the ones associated with Alcubierre warp drive.
As to theoretical FTL, well it's easy mathematically to talk about but is the exotic matter it requires even possible? Even if it is, what about the immense energy requirements. Also any form of FTL is effectively a time machine and has the potential to violate causality. These are major problems that fiction that utilizes these things often handwaves away or ignores entirely.
I've been working a bit on a setting that's hard, for the most part, but with "soft" elements like ftl and psionics being just explicitly magical. there's a scene in the second season of Doom Patrol where a clunky sci-fi-looking rocket is revealed to actually be powered by a severed goat head within some sort of chaos-magick shrine. establish clear limits on what the occult can *reliably* do -- and establish that trying to venture outside those limits can be fruitful but also in all probability a massive mess -- and you can reasonably have a setup where hard scifi is the underpinning of most of what happens but coexists uneasily with the weird shit :)
Post a Comment